While Pakistan’s innumerable acts of aiding and abetting terrorism directed at India have been well-chronicled for more than 25 years, a former CIA official has now revealed that as far back as in the early 1990s, the United States came close to placing Islamabad on its list of State sponsors of terrorism.
Robert l Grenier, who was on deputation from CIA to the State Department at the time, made the disclosure at a Congressional hearing on Thursday during which Senators, both Republican and Democratic, slammed Pakistan’s selective actions against terror, sparing outfits like leT and Haqqani Network that target India and Afghanistan.
“At the start of the (Bill) Clinton administration, in 1993 and 1994, I was a special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, on loan from CIA, deeply involved in an annual terrorism review which nearly resulted in Pakistan’s being placed on the formal list of state sponsors of terrorism,” Grenier stated in his written testimony, without going into details of the review.
India has made repeated pleas to the US over the past 25 years or so to designate Pakistan as a State sponsor of terror, but Washington never got to do it. The State Department’s punitive list currently features only three countries: Iran, Syria and Sudan. Countries removed from the list over a period of time include Iraq, libya, Cuba, North Korea and South Yemen.
The designated nations are subject to extensive sanctions including a ban on defence sales, controls over exports of dual use items and a series of financial and other restrictions, including stringent curbs on US foreign assistance.
In his testimony, Grenier drives home the point how the United States over the past 50 years and more “has been willing, episodically, to overlook its concerns with aspects of Pakistani behaviour and to subordinate those concerns in the face of what have appeared, at the time, to be overriding national security priorities”.
In a candid observation, Grenier noted how the US, needing a platform for operations in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and a partner to intercept Al Qaeda militants fleeing that country, was “again willing to subordinate its broader concerns with Pakistani-based militancy in Kashmir and with Pakistan’s ambivalent attitude toward the Afghan Taliban”.
It has been “a repetitive cycle at work” with the overlooking of concerns reverting to a more contentious relationship time and again, recalled Grenier, who had also done a stint as CIA station chief in Islamabad during a crucial three-year period, ending 2002.
While US-Pakistan relations have gone through “cycles of boom and bust”, one constant has been Pakistan clinging stubbornly to its perceived national interest even when that pursuit has “seemed irrational or self-defeating to US eyes”, Grenier commented, listing various instances.
At the hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker accused Pakistan’s military and intelligence service of duplicity for providing safe haven to the Haqqani leadership within the country despite their government’s stated commitment to target them and other terrorist organizations in exchange for continued US security assistance.
“We have this policy where in effect we are working with Pakistan and yet the extreme duplicity that exists with the relationship is that on one hand they say they want to see a stable Afghanistan, on the other hand they are harboring people and through their own proxies are destabilizing Afghanistan,” said Corker as he expressed “continued frustration” over Pakistan’s refusal to act against the Haqqani network. Senator Ben Cardin, the committee’s Ranking Democrat, termed the US’s ties with Pakistan “very challenging”, noting: “They (the Pakistanis) have been very selective in going after terrorist networks in particular the Haqqani network and leT. We have problems with Pakistan.”